1-15 April 2016 Cyber Attacks Timeline

Spring has sprung, and it’s now time to publish the first timeline of April.

Even if this fortnight has not been particularly rich of events from a mere numeric perspective, a few breaches are destined to be remembered for long for the consequences not necessarily limited at the infosec community. I am obviously talking about the Mossack Fonseca leak, the dump containing the records of 50 million Turkish citizens, and the 43Gb of data belonging to the Syrian Nation Agency for Network Services. The list of the victims of massive breaches also included Naughty America with its 3.8 million accounts.

On the Cyber Espionage/Cyber War front, this has been quite a tough period for Sweden whose air traffic control system has been allegedly targeted by Russian hackers (a solar storm according to the official version). In the same days the Swedish Armed force has revealed that their military computers were hacked and used in an attack targeting major US banks in 2013… Not a great reward for a military network.

And while the Cyber War between Armenia and Azerbaijan reached new levels (with the involvement of Turkish actors), there is nothing particularly meaningful to mention related to hacktivism. Well… Like every year hacktivists from all over the world threatened Israel in occasion of the so-called #OpIsrael declared for April 7th. However, following the trend of the last few years, the damages (if any) were absolutely negligible.

If you want to have an idea of how fragile our electronic identity is inside the cyberspace, have a look at the timelines of the main Cyber Attacks in 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014,2015 and, in a bit, 2016 (regularly updated). You may also want to have a look at the Cyber Attack Statistics that are regularly published, and follow @paulsparrows on Twitter for the latest updates.

Also, feel free to submit remarkable incidents that in your opinion deserve to be included in the timelines (and charts).

Additionally, if you want, you can access the timeline in Google Sheet format: